MEDIA STUDIES
Hutton turned out to be brutal with a stake, but Jaspan should forget about high-minded Hugo
STEPHEN GLOVER
Mr Jaspan's unleashing of three articles last week on an unsuspecting public may be further proof of this ineptitude. He wrote a three-page cover story in the New States- man, a long piece on the Times's media page and another philippic in the journal- ists' trade magazine, Press Gazette. I do not think I can recall a sacked editor letting from so many different platforms at the same time. Evidently when Mr Jaspan's severance terms were agreed the Scott Trust omitted to get him to sign a confiden- tiality agreement prohibiting a subsequent settling of scores. The theme of all his pieces was 'I wuz robbed' — and robbed, moreover, by as snooty and disagreeable a bunch of people as you could hope not to meet.
Fleet Street is a tough old world, but there seems no reason why an editor, if he has to be sacked, cannot be despatched with a modicum of courtesy. When Mr Jas- pan was appointed to the Observer, translat- ed from the editorship of the Scotsman, Mr Young represented him as a provincial genius, a new Harold Evans. I had my doubts, and expressed them in print, but Mr Jaspan can be forgiven for taking his welcome in the spirit in which it was offered. According to this erstwhile hero's own account, when he was dismissed he was telephoned at home by the same Mr Young and, without thanks or explanation, told that the game was over, and that he could not return to the Observer even to bid farewell to his staff.
Mr Young is a high-minded Guardian columnist of liberal inclination, and it is amusing (to us, not Mr Jaspan) to hear of him acting like a hard-boiled tabloid pro- prietor. It is also difficult to suppress a smile on learning of the behaviour of Will Hutton, Mr Jaspan's successor at the Observer and author of the best selling book, The State We're In. Mr Hutton is an enthusiastic proponent of the `stakeholding economy', in which loyal and hard-working employees are encouraged to regard them- selves as having a permanent stake in the companies for which they work. At the Observer Mr Hutton has set about sacking long-serving employees with abandon, some of whom, such as the journalist Mark Frankland, are people of distinction. In this context a stake is not so much a stay and comfort to the employee as a weapon which the employer may drive into him.
But shake our heads though we may, we can't represent Mr Jaspan's editorship as a glorious period. The Observer stood — and stands — in need of revival as a left-of centre newspaper with intellectual weight, but Mr Jaspan is neither left-wing nor obvi- ously intellectual. He had something of a reputation as a newspaper technician, but when he came to relaunch the Observer last October he produced — to borrow his phrase in the Times applied to Mr Hutton's own relaunch two weeks ago — 'a design mishmash and a sheer act of vandalism'. With the exception of the 'Review', Mr Jas- pan's Observer looked awful. His flawed approach is evident when he describes his dependence on market research. 'Out of these focus groups', he writes in the Times, 'we began to evolve new ideas for the per- fect Sunday. These were distilled into work- ing dummies.' It is little wonder that it didn't come off.
This is not the moment to discuss Mr Hutton's rejigged Observer in detail. It is not yet as impressive as it might be. There are improvements, but the new 'Review' section is less attractive than Mr Jaspan's, and not as well organised. The books pages, for which hopes are high, are unfortunately overshadowed by a page of `lonely heart' ads. Other reviews are jumbled together in a chaotic way. The paper has a more sub- stantial political voice but it still lacks seri- ous columnists and doesn't have as sure a touch as the Independent on Sunday, which ran a brilliant page on Orwell's 'betrayal' of crypto-communists to the security services, while the Observer had nothing. But these are early days. We will see. Let us mean- while hope that Mr Jaspan can forget what was done to him and find another berth.
There are several record-breaking feats among newspapers' June circulation figures published by the Audit Bureau of Circula- tion. The Daily Mirror: average daily sales of 2,408,455 — a new post-war low. The Sunday Express: a post-war low at 1,202,354. The Daily Express: also a new post-war low at 1,219,591. The Observer.• a whisker above a 40-year low at 443,348. The Independent on Sunday: an all-time low at 294,923. The Independent's sales of 272,928 were close to its worst ever, notwithstanding recent striking improve- ments. At 420,037 the London Evening Standard recorded its second lowest month- ly average since 1980 when it merged with the Evening News. The combined title sold an average of 641,449 during its first six months. The Standard's recent steep decline is rather alarming, but I refuse to believe the rumours about the impending fate of Max Hastings, installed as editor only six months ago. Surely they couldn't be so cruel?
None of this makes happy reading for a month which is by no means the worst for newspaper sales. Probably no set of figures has ever revealed so bad a situation for so many titles. And yet not everything is gloomy. In June the Daily Mail was not very far from a post-war high at 2,038,039, even though its sales were down from May. At 300,889 the Financial Times was within sight of its best ever figure. The Times, which sold an average of 724,839, achieved the highest circulation in its history. The improvement of some seven per cent over May can be entirely attributed to cutting the price of the paper to 10p on Mondays, a reduction which will last throughout the summer. Most of the new readers seem not to be the sort whom advertisers covet which is to say, they do not have a high dis- posable income. They may well no longer buy the paper on Mondays when (or if?) the cover price reverts to 30p. But for the moment the Times is bucking a trend, albeit at considerable financial cost to itself.
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